Call for Proposals
Attending to Early Modern Women: Remapping Routes and Spaces

Milwaukee, Wisconsin June 21-June 23, 2012

Attending to Early Modern Women, which has been held seven times at the
University of Maryland since 1990, is moving to the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, thanks to the generous support of the College of
Letters and Science at UWM. The conference will retain its innovative
format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote
dialogue, augmented by a keynote, and a plenary session on each of the
four conference topics: communities, environments, exchanges, and
pedagogies. It will be held at the UWM School of Continuing Education
Conference Center in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, within easy
walking distance of the lakeshore, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the
Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Amtrak station. Attendees will stay in
the near-by and newly renovated Doubletree Hotel. The conference will
run from Thursday June 21 through Saturday June 23, 2012, and attendees
will also have the opportunity to participate in a special
pre-conference seminar on Wednesday June 20 at the Center for
Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Detailed instructions on submitting workshop proposals may be found on
the conference website:
www.atw2012.uwm.edu
Attending to Early Modern Women: Remapping Routes and Spaces
How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did
they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How did
gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner space
of the body to the outer spaces of the cosmos? How do new disciplinary
and geographic connections shape the ways in which we think, write, and
teach about the early modern world? Taking as our inspiration the move
of Attending to Early Modern Women from Maryland to Milwaukee, we will
consider these issues in relationship to the following topics:
Communities
Women’s actions in neighborhoods, villages, cities, states, and empires;
family and kinship networks; establishing and breaching boundaries in
sexual and gender expression; religious communities; exclusions, exiles,
and expulsions.
Environments
Gendered landscapes and soundscapes; the body and its borders; built and
invented realms and frontiers; cartographic spaces; gender and the new
cosmology and anatomy.
Exchanges
Travel, migration, and displacement; imagined spatial crossings; new
interdisciplinary connections; the circulation of manuscripts, books,
objects, and ideas; consumerism and material culture; transnational and
transoceanic links.
Pedagogies
Traveling new routes in teaching; the virtual spaces of technology and
teaching; early modern women in the realm of museums and galleries for
adults and children; issues in academic institutions and in publishing.